Every year since as a far back as I can remember, my folks and I would hop in the car on the first day of August and make the nine hour drive to New Brunswick to visit my grandparents. Both of my parents grew up there- my mother in Freddericton, my father in St. Andrews, but they met in Ontario and got married. And ever since then, they've made the effort to return to the east coast every year.
Freddericton is a place of quaint, turn-of-the-century houses and many sloping streets, making pedestrian travel a bother. Despite this fact, being that we were from Southern Ontario, we would stubbornly huff and puff our way up and down the neighbourhoods, seeing what there was to see.
One year, we passed by a small gift shop up at the far end of High street. I was intrigued by the sign, which I had seen several times throughout our travels (it was in fact, part of an arts & crafts initiative on the part of the New Brunswick government) and carefully crossed the street to the other side.
My mother, on the other hand, had seen something in the middle of the road.
It must have been a piece of someone's craft, gone astray. Something with a red bow. In any case, when she stooped to pick it up, the trucker coming up the hill chose that moment to glance in my direction on the sidewalk. I was too busy taking the photo to notice what was happening.
Her bag landed in front of me mere seconds after.
1 comment:
To borrow a phrase from a fellow instructor, this is really sophisticated.
There are a number of interesting threads running through this story, but the one that strikes me most is that the photograph is actually implicated in the tale. In fact, you could make a case that the photograph is a character; some would go so far as to say that the photograph is a murderer.
Very clever indeed. The entire coding of the photograph changes from beginning to end: from harmless, quaint little icon to a symbol of the worst moment of your life.
You could quite easily read this story as an indictment of photography itself.
Post a Comment